Adobe Digital Editions 4 Spy Allegations

In the last couple of days there have been some interesting allegations about what Adobe Digital Editions 4 reports back to base and how it does it. See The Digital Reader and here as well as in Ars Technica.

There are legitimate reasons for transmitting book details back to the mother-ship - for example to check DRM validity or synchronize the current page across multiple devices. However it is alleged that Adobe are doing this as JSON messages over HTTP. This would mean that the information is being sent in effectively plain text - unencrypted - so anyone at an intermediate server the message passes through as it makes its way across the Web could read it.